The fourteenth artist from East Wing Nine’s EXHIBITIONISM at The Courtauld Institute of Art opening on 23rd January is Roger Ballen…

Somewhere between the rawness of the documentary and the theatricality of the staged, Roger Ballen’s black and white photographs demonstrate the disquieting effect of the unknown on the human psyche. Cropped out of context and re-presented through the mechanical eye of the camera lens, the fragments of human existence take on new dimensions, creating drama in the mundane and a disturbing normalising of the extraordinary or shocking.

The images are the result of an interactive and dynamic process between the artist, his subject and the surrounding environment; thus real life subjects are transformed into compositional tools. Ballen deliberately draws our attention to the ultimate disjunction between actuality and the photograph – here what is seen through the photographer’s lens balances on the blurred line between fact and fiction, where the intensity created by a constructed composition is heightened by the unpredictable element of spontaneity, inevitable to shots taken on location in existing environments outside of the photographer’s studio. Real life becomes abstract and fictive narratives take on the veracity of the documentary, leaving the viewer to question their own belief in the inherent truth of the photograph. Here the photograph becomes, as Doug McClemont has observed, “A lie that tells the truth”.

Roger Ballen’s work in the field of geology for over 30 years has no doubt effected his way of looking at the objects that he captures, which is tempered by a scientific detachment that is at once both distanced and yet emotionally charged. A banal object – such as a skull – becomes the basis for an emotive encounter or a comment on the human condition. Ballen has said, “I have always profoundly believed that art should be a spiritual activity”; as such his works provoke a psychological response from the viewer, and this is the mark of their success.

Utilising the negative space of a composition and creating substance out of the transient and indeterminate, Ballen’s images maintain an uneasy tension that is simultaneously both compelling and disturbing, situated between the oppositions of light and dark, comic and tragic. In looking at these images it becomes clear that such dichotomies can co-exist, and indeed continually overlap and intersect in everyday life.

“It is clear to me without ‘the dark’ there would not be ‘the light’ and vice versa.”

Ape Skull, 2002
Fragments, 2005
Twirling Wires, 2007